1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system that can continuously print a plurality of jobs in an order designated by a user, a control method thereof and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Variable data printing (VDP) is used in printing a print product such as direct mail by combining print data common to each page with variable data which changes for each page. In performing VDP, a plurality of types of paper may be used in one print product, or finishing may be switched a plurality of times. Further, different applications appropriate for each of page contents are often used in VDP, such as drawing software for printing a cover page, word processing software for printing a body text, and a spreadsheet application for printing a statement.
There is a method for outputting such a print product on one printing apparatus. More specifically, a print product is divided into a plurality of jobs according to the application that can handle a print setting or a content of the page. The plurality of jobs is then printed from the same personal computer (PC) in the desired order of output, and the series of outputs are collected into one print product. However, if the printing apparatus prints data corresponding to one page after printing the data corresponding to a large number of pages, the printing apparatus may output the print job of the data corresponding to one page first. Further, if the printing apparatus is connected to a network, a job from another PC may become mixed into the series of jobs.
To solve such problems, there is a method for combining all print jobs into one job after spooling the print jobs in a host side and then transmitting to the printing apparatus (i.e., job combination method). Further, there is a method for spooling all print jobs on the host side and then transmitting the printing jobs to the printing apparatus in the order designated by the user (i.e., collective printing) (e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-75768).
On the other hand, recent multifunction peripherals include an execution environment of the application software. Examples of the execution environment are MEAP (registered trademark) by Canon Inc., Embedded Software Architecture (ESA) (registered trademark) by Ricoh Corporation, and ApeosPort (registered trademark) by Xerox Corporation. By executing the software on the multifunction peripheral, it becomes easier to customize functions or add functions that are originally not included in the apparatus, without reconfiguring the apparatus itself.
However, if only one print setting can be specified to each of the plurality of jobs combined in the job combination method, a printing result of one of the jobs may be changed. Further, in the case of the collective printing method, a job from another PC may become mixed when the printing apparatus connected via the network receives the jobs. Thus, it is necessary to limit the PC that transmits the job to the printing apparatus to one PC.
Furthermore, in the case of both the job combination method and the collective printing method, the data is transmitted to the printing apparatus after all of the jobs are received on the host side. A long time thus elapses from receiving an output start instruction from the user to outputting the result. Moreover, since fixed pages are also printed each time from the host, efficiency does not become improved.